The QAnon conspiracy snowball gets bigger and dirtier: A visit to the GreatAwakening subreddit

The world looks pretty scary once you start seeing sinister patterns everywhere

By David Futrelle

By now you may be familiar with the broad outlines of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which might be described, in essence, as Pizzagate on steroids.

As True Q Believers see the world, the heroic Donald Trump, with the help of numerous “patriots” inside the government and out, is fighting a grand battle against the vast Illuminati pedophile baby-eating cabal that secretly controls the government (and the world). And, yes, Q Believers have actually convinced themselves that the top cabal figures (including Hillary Clinton) are literal “pedovores” who drink the blood and eat the flesh of babies.

But as horrific as it all sounds, Q Believers think that Trump is actually winning his battle against the baby eaters, armed with literally tens of thousands of sealed indictments that will be used to arrest the key cabal members — in government, business, and Hollywood — when the time is right. Q Believers need only keep their eyes on the prize. “Trust the plan,” Q has assured them numerous times in his (their?) cryptic messages on 8chan.

While the basic thesis of QAnon Theory is already plenty weird, the details are even stranger — and they get stranger still by the day. QAnon is a giant dirty snowball of a theory, growing ever larger as it careens down the mountainside, picking up new sub-theories with every new rotation. The mysterious Q drops new “crumbs” virtually every day, and each one is pored over and taken apart by a small army of self-designated Q interpreters, who use the new clues to spin out new theories and add new enemies to Q’s ever-growing enemies list.

I spent several hours today going through just some of the topics posted over the past 24 hours in the GreatAwakening subreddit — Reddit’s main forum for Q Believers, with nearly 60,000 subscribers. Here are a few of the not-actually-true things I, er, “learned” in the process.

Q Believers have spent a great deal of time examining aerial photos of Epstein’s island hideaway, which they have taken to calling “pedophile island” because of all the reputed underage sex parties that have been rumored to have taken place there. (Epstein was convicted of soliciting prostitution from an underage girl in 2008, so that’s not an altogether fanciful scenario,)

Anyhoo, they’ve been suspicious about his tennis courts for a while and now they think they’ve found proof that they were built to hide missile silos. Or maybe the tennis courts don’t exist at all, and the photos available through Google maps have been doctored!

“I did a lot of map comparisons of E Island a few months ago,” WOWs_JohnPRyan writes.

I also noticed the “tennis court” cover by G maps. I initially thought that section was actually a sacrificial area or a burn area … the thought of missile launchers never came to mind, but I can see how it fits now.

So, Google maps have superimposed a fake tennis court over what looks like a missile silo, where Apple maps shows what´s really there? Is that right? If so, Alphabet (Google parent company) and Eric Schmidt are 100% complicit. He is a Jew, too. If this is true, this is highly significant!

To someone called tlbt, the nukes help to explain why so many people (allegedly) go along with the vast (alleged) Illuminati pedophile conspiracy.

This post is about protecting/forcing the practice with the threat of thermonuclear hellfire. Like, holy shit, imagine thinking you’re part of the elite, finally get invited to a private island to connect with other power players, then get shown missiles that will destroy everything you love. Then you’re forced to participate in a sinister ritual (which is documented, blackmail) before you can go back up the elevator and back to what you thought was normal life. Sounds like a way of controlling powerful people to me.

Red shoes symbolize blood spilled in ritual sacrifices, and have to be earned

I theorize that the red shoes worn by certain people are earned, not worn ‘just because’.

IMO..they represent blood on the feet. To be initiated into this death cult, you must kill virgins in a Babylonian style death ritual.

Akilyoung ties this theory in with discussions elsewhere in r/GreatAwakening of a pool owned by alleged Illuminati pedovore Gloria Vanderbilt (Anderson Cooper’s mom):

The pool with nooses? The virgins are strung up, and the initiate cuts them (wont get into details) and bleeds them out. The initiate is walking around in their blood doing his evil work, and ends up with red feet.

Thus they wear red shoes to symbolize their deeds, and SYMBOLISM WILL BE THEIR DOWNFALL.

Weird. I think I owned some red sneakers once. I just bought them from a shoestore. No virgin murder necessary.

Anderson Cooper is a “satanic pedophile” who orders kids to rape from a catalog

Reddit’s Q Believers have been examining a picture of CNN’s Anderson Cooper sitting in his office looking at what appears to be printouts of news stories from the web; behind him lurks a life-sized standee of Honey Boo-Boo. Some Q Believers have managed to convince themselves that Cooper is looking through a child sex slave catalog trying to decide on a child to rape.

QAnonMaga reports that

Q pointed out the papers on the table they are from a catalog where you order kids to have sex with the writing was enhanced and enlarged photos of a boy and girl and Cyrillic language he was so arrogant he let the photographer take a picture of illegal stuff.

Huh. Here is the highest-resolution of the picture I could find online, posted on a site devoted to Q “research.” Here’s an enlarged version of the papers that Cooper is reading.

I see what looks like a picture of an adult couple. I can’t read any of the words; I don’t see any distinctly Cyrillic letters.

Recent XBox Live outages are evidence of cabal members trying to clean up evidence of their nefarious plots that they shared with each other in … Xbox Chat?

“So Q drops that he knows they were communicating with Xbox chat,” writes HouseSlytherin.

Which probably means Q has the chat logs. They double down and try and erase all that information on the server? Doesn’t that make them guilty of another crime? Assuming they were government employees at the time, they are deleting public record.

Gaming has always been a comfort thing for me ever since I was a little girl with my first game boy, knowing microsoft was betraying me kind of hurts.

Now obviously I’m skeptical of virtually all QAnon claims. But I don’t have a hard time believing that if there were a vast Q conspiracy Microsoft would be in it up to the neck. Clearly the company that brought us both Clippy and Windows 7 is capable of ANYTHING.

I’m happy to see I’m not the only one who rereads favorite childhood books as an adult☺. “Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH” was a favorite book of mine, and I reread it every few years.

RE: QAnon. I wonder how many people really and truly believe in this drivel. I hope most of the people on the Reddit message boards are there strictly for laughs. Here we are, flirting with fascism, and people are wasting time with this?

I’ve read the books! They were my favorites as a kid and I’ve read them many times as an adult too.

My husband bought me the entire collection a few years ago after a couple of mine disappeared. (& I never had the entire series to begin with). Sadly, they made the text *super* tiny. I had planned to read it to the kids, but without the pictures from the originals, or the easily read text, it was an effort in futility. Which sucks because I loved those books. And the Mary Poppins series, which most people don’t realise was a series and which I’ve never been able to find since I read them when I was 8 or 9.

I’ll just point out a little fun fact here. To many people involved in the marketing industry and new media, the Qanon setup described in this article – a single party dropping extremely vague hints and a highly dedicated group of followers going to extreme lengths to decode it – will be very familiar as it is the literal word for word definition of an Alternate Reality Game. Games that rely on crowdsourcing knowledge, processing power and manhours. I’m not saying it is meant to be a game but whichever russian psyops are behind it clearly drew inspiration from ARGs.

Well, my shiny red Docs and my pink suede Docs are waiting for it to get chilly again, but the glittery pink slippers go down well at storytelling.

If only people knew what I was secretly signalling to them! –
(It’s that I like colourful clothing, and they probably do know that).

The whole Qanon con seems related to that thing where someone says or does something indefensible, gets called on it, and then says “I’ll leave you to work that out for yourself.”

People will actually attempt to do that.

It’s brilliant, in that nobody has to invent a plausible excuse, apologise or bother with boring stuff like consistency and information. Just pump enough sewage into the paddling pool and tell everyone to take a good long drink.

QAnon has to be a deliberate attempt to draw attention away from the allegations that Trump raped underaged girls supplied by Jeffrey Epstein (and the accuser dropped the suit after being deluged by death threats from Trump supporters).

I mean, since when are conservatives anti-pedo? Or even against child death, post-birth?

I’ll try not to bang on about landscape, and how we as humans relate to them and manipulate them. No-one wants ten thousand words on alignments and sacred and profane spaces.

But I’d be interested in what our friend has to say about London. When I lived there I had a weird thing of seeking out examples of broken clocks on buildings. I wish I had better photos. I could have done a coffee table book.

Alex Jones has been silenced? I mean, he’s been pushing anti government conspiracies since the 90s. Why, if he’s an actual threat uncovering truths, has he not been assassinated long ago? Why has he spouted his drivel unabated on every platform until finally his incitement of violence against Sandy Hook families made him too much of a PR issue for most platforms?

Psychogeography… reminds me of an article I read by Fredric Jameson on postmodernism that had the concept of “cognitive mapping.” He was arguing that people don’t feel at home in places (esp. anonymous urban centres) that don’t have recognizable landmarks, and drew a parallel between this and the anonymous, de-centered nature of late-stage capitalism.

You can find it here! Warning: there are some copying typos, and besides from a refreshing first sentence*, it’s pretty dry and dense with academic jargon.

It’s basically a Marxist critique of postmodernism, saying that postmodernism hides the mechanics of the market while still glorifying consumption. (Again, evidence that Jordan Peterson’s conflation of postmodernism and “neo-Marxism” isn’t well-informed.) I agree with this partly, but I think the Internet, for instance, still has a “sense of place” – maybe that’s just my cyberpunk readings for my sci-fi course talking, and anyway this was published in 1990, before the modern Internet.

I was reading it for a class I had with a student on “Irish Literature and the Irish Landscape.” We applied the article to Paul Murray’s novel The Mark and the Void, in which the narrator is a French man working at an international bank in Dublin – his work makes him feel alienated from his surroundings. …The book is a comedy and quite fun, though the parts mocking sexism in the bank industry are counterbalanced by (seeming) misogyny in the book itself – many descriptions of women centre around whether Claude finds them hot or not, in situations where that’s irrelevant. Maybe it’s more a narrator thing than an author thing.

*”I am addressing a subject about which I know nothing whatsoever, except for the fact that it does not exist.” 😀

@WWTH “they” wouldn’t even have to kill Jones. There are a bunch of ways of discrediting someone if you have the kind of power the conspiracies Jones claims to believe in do. Jones being stuck in jail after a huge cache of child porn was found on his computer would avoid making him a martyr.

I can only speak for myself, but if you’re referring to different platforms, communities, etc. having distinct “vibes,” then yes, definitely.

I was on LJ for more than ten years; about a year ago I finally moved permanently to the backup blog I’d made on Dreamwidth, and it’s beginning to feel like home again, mainly because I’ve found most of my LJ friends who have moved as well. It really does feel rather as though we’ve accomplished some kind of group migration.

As I have attended several actual Marxist seminars, organised by the IMT, I find it hilarious that folk like Peterson and Alex Jones conflate Marxism with postmodernism. Basically, this us so far off the beam it’s not even funny. I attended a lecture on this at an event last year. Marxists are stringently against postmodernism because postmodernism distrusts and critiques meta narratives, which seek to explain history and how we got here, including the fundamental meta narrative of historical materialism which to the most dogmatic Marxists is preached as an irrefutable fact.

Here is a video of the actual lecture if your interested. Don’t just take my word for it.

That is a fucking LOT of men who exhibit predatory behavior towards people just barely out of girlhood. Like, if you know a bunch of guys with OKC profiles, you probably know at least one who is routinely creepy to very young and vulnerable women.

So yeah, I’m guessing this is in part the world that QAnon adherents are coming from. Loathsome, isn’t it?

Those weird carcasses are typically large sharks or whales in advanced stages of decomposition. Often the lower jaw will fall off, leaving an unfamiliar silhouette, and scavengers pick at the skin leaving the “hairy” look.

@Virgin Mary
Yeah, Marx is absolutely a Modern philosopher. But I doubt any alt-righter could explain the difference, let alone define dialectical materialism. Postmodernists wrote a few papers disussing gender, and that’s obviously bad, meanwhile Marxists are obviously bad, so they must be the same thing, right? Socrates totally wouldn’t scream at that chain of logic /s

Weird Eddie – Looking at some ‘learn Russian’ sites, I see that I’m fulla sommat-or-other and you’re quite right! In my defense, my Russian language training was over thirty years ago and I haven’t done much with it since. *ashamed face*

Lexilogos has lots of non-English keyboards and is awesome. Here’s the Russian Cyrillic one: https://www.lexilogos.com/keyboard/russian.htm
All you have to do is type what you want in the box and then copy/paste.
Очеиь хорошо! You can even type right from your English keyboard if you know the letter combinations for the sounds!

I missed a drive by troll? Oh well, nothing terribly interesting. I do wish we had a different term than “conspiracy theory” for the Qanon, lizard people are controlling the government, jet fuel can’t melt steal beams, evil Jews are controlling the world type of stuff.

Because conspiracy is a real thing and a legal term and everything. Just because some people in ridiculous and far fetched conspiracy things, doesn’t mean that groups of people never conspire to commit crimes. There should be a term that recognizes that distinction.

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